Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) (8 page)

With that strategy making sense, the cruiser suddenly
began to move forward, prompting an eyebrow raise from Travis. He wasn’t going
to distract anyone by asking what was going on, but he was curious…then he
noticed several smaller drones falling into position behind the cruiser a
moment before he got a second prompt telling him to shift the majority of his
shields into the forward arc and fan it out a bit to provide cover for them.

That was a very aggressive play, but if that’s what
they wanted then so be it. Travis made the changes to shield shape, then gutted
80% of the rear shields and shunted that energy forward, losing a lot in the
transfer but almost immediately doubled the forward matrix density. He left a
thin layer around the rear of the ship and began redistributing armor blocks
there to cover for the lesser defense, but for the moment the only ships with a
good firing line on the cruiser’s rear were her sister ships, so it seemed to
be a worthy gamble.

Over the next ten minutes the cruiser dished out and
took a hell of a beating, eventually reaching a range where it was able to fire
a number of cleansing beams into a nearby defense station before that weapon
was damaged. It didn’t retreat then, and Travis stayed with it gaining every
little advantage that he could for the ship as it played blocker, running into
a thick group of enemy cruisers and tearing into them with its maulers and
talon cannons while subsequently attracting the majority of the enemy firepower
to it.

The smaller drones that were following it were
therefore allowed to get deeper into the enemy lines than they otherwise would
have, bringing them within short weapon range. They stayed in the cruiser’s
shadow as long as they could, then they broke up and dove at the enemy like a
Nidalee
on a half health ADC.

Travis only saw part of that battle before the cruiser
was destroyed and his screen blanked, along with the mental connection
severing. He had a breather of all of six seconds before he saw a request
prompt on the screen asking him to take control of a specific function. The
Archon accepted rather than surfing through the options and wasting time,
suddenly finding himself in control of two mauler cannons on a frigate. He saw
the end of one of them firing as his screen came up, meaning he’d just replaced
another pilot from that duty…who would be shunted to another task or reduced
from multitasking down to a single, more efficient focus.

Travis took the controls and got another salvo off
with barely any break in sequence, seeing a full dreadnaught eclipsing his
gunner’s view. The enemy ship had its shields down and bare hull in front of
him, with Travis gladly using his pair of weapons to chew apart the yellow/tan
hull plates at nearly pointblank range.

8

March 5, 2755

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Low stellar
orbit

“Ouch,” the Captain of the troop jumpship said upon
seeing the fleet status as it updated upon their arrival into the system.

“What?” Iden-202747 asked from the commander’s chair
behind his, where a large holographic map of Varasiss had just come up showing
a considerable lizard fleet still holding on to a piece of orbit centered on a
trio of defense stations.

“Look at our drone count.”

The striker pulled up those numbers with a few button
presses, seeing that better than two thirds of the drones had been destroyed.
He frowned, bringing up the jumpship count and finding that all of those were
still operational, meaning no one had died in what, at first glance looked to
be a defeat for Star Force. It had been expected that the orbital battles would
have been completed before the convoy of troop transports arrived, or at least
with the lizards being driven off into other parts of the system to be hunted
down later.

With the amount of drones lost and the lizard foothold
in orbit, it appeared things were not going well.

“Orders,” the Captain said, relaying the updated
transmission that was being bounced from jumpship to jumpship as they came into
the star system, with
Iden’s
being the 18th in line.
The mainline troops had jumped ahead of them, with this convoy being comprised
of all the Clans. Behind them would be the Axius convoy followed by the others.

Iden
read the orders, seeing
the Captain signal to the helmsman to get them underway immediately. The
jumpship began to move on the primary bridge map around the perimeter of the
star following the other Clan vessels as they cleared the jumpline for more of
their own to come in and began the trek over to the Varasiss jumppoint, for it
seemed they were wanted at the planet immediately.

And not just for a holding orbit. As
Iden
read through the orders he saw that they contained a
sitrep
explaining the situation…and he suddenly understood
why so many drones had been lost.

“
Larkey
?”

“What’s up?” the ranger asked, standing behind him a
few steps.

“Looks like we’re going to have to earn this one on
the ground. The lizards have set up some extremely large surface to orbit
phaser arrays preventing orbital bombardment. The fleet sacrificed a lot of
drones to punch out a few colonies to give us a blind spot, but the rest we’re
going to have to take down on the ground before the fleet can move in.”

“Shit. Sounds like a
Hoth
scenario.”

“It is,”
Iden
said, pointing
to the section of the orders that identified it as such, “and they want the
Clans going in first.”

Larkey-319228 smirked. “We are the best.”

“Softening duty,”
Iden
continued. “Mainline will mount the main assault supported by the non-Human units.
Extreme hazard conditions for us.”

Larkey
nodded. “Looks like
we’ve seen the end of lizard extermination missions then. Didn’t think it’d be
that easy this long. About time they came up with a proper surface defense.”

“The fleet is going to work on taking out the last of
the orbital defenses while we head down, meaning that if they lose we’re going
to be in a very awkward place.”

“Did we lose
that
many ships?”

“Have a look,”
Iden
said,
enlarging the armchair display and throwing it up as a second hologram that
showed the losses on both sides, with the green lizard numbers far exceeding
the Star Force gold.

“What the hell. Did they really have half the enemy
fleet here?”

“Seems like it. Sorry we missed that fight, but it
looks like we’re going to have an even harder one on the ground, for they’ve
stacked defenses down there too.”

“Bring it.”

“Cap, give me
shipwide
,”
Iden
said, pausing a moment until a light on his armchair
showed that he was connected. The Archon telekinetically pressed the button and
began speaking to the air.

“Attention all
badasses
. Our
favorite waste of bullets have proven themselves just as devious and dangerous
as well all know they are, but this time really takes the cake. They’ve taken
their new weapon and used it to take away our orbital bombardment capability
via a lot of really big guns on the surface. Naval has pounded us an entry
vector the hard way, leaving us with only a third of the drones we came with
and more lizards in orbit left to kill.”

“While they work on winning that fight we’re going
down to the surface, head of the line. The Clans are going to be the tip of
this spear and tasked with the hardest objectives. We have to soften the lizard
defenses up enough that the Calavari and Bsidd don’t get slaughtered, and mainline
will be holding their hands throughout, but the lizards have dug in good and
have a nearly infinity supply of their scaly asses to throw at us, so we’re in
for a tough fight.”

“This one we have to earn, and without air cover until
we knock down a lot of defense turrets. That means infantry and mechs and no
Lacvamat until we take down the priority structures. Not sure how we’re going
to play this one yet, but Clan Jinx gets to live up to its namesake in the
coming days. Everyone get prepped immediately. In a few hours we’re going to be
on Varasiss dirt.”

Iden
clicked the button
again, this time with his finger, cancelling the
comm
channel. “Cap, find us a good parking spot…and thanks for the ride.”

“Wreak some havoc,” he said, which was Clan Jinx’s
version of ‘good luck.’

Iden
threw him a two
fingered salute as he stood up and jogged off the bridge with
Larkey
, intending to get geared up and on the first
dropship heading down.

By the time
Iden
and some
200+ Jinxes were in a dropship flying down to the surface the first of his
jumpship’s heavy transports had already detached from its holding rack. The
four destroyer drones they’d brought with them were also gone, having been sent
over to the main fleet to help replace what had been lost, but the rest of the jumpship’s
carry space was full of landing ships carrying the bulk of the troops and the
heavy equipment. A scattering of conventional dropships were going with them,
along with a pair of drop pods.

Those two were trailing slightly behind
Iden’s
dropship and heading to firebase 8 on Larissa’s
orders and would be depositing their Mark III
Madcats
directly into battle. The landing zone
Iden
was
heading to
was
one of the more stable ones, located on
a plain that existed between the mix of buildings and rubble that were the
nearby lizard colonies that the fleet had painstakingly pounded from orbit to
eliminate any aerial hazards that could have interfered with the grounding of
the troops. As it was there were hundreds of thousands of wisps in the air and currently
being held at bay by an army of mechs with anti-air capability.

The
madcats
would add to
that considerably, with the first priority right now being to get the firebases
up to snuff and their defenses online, which wasn’t only against ground troops
but naval ships as well. Each of the prefab structures contained at minimum one
cleansing beam capable of reaching back up to orbit located on the top of a
high tower, allowing it to tip over and shoot targets on the ground so long as
they weren’t too close, given the angles involved.

Clan Ninja Monkey and Clan Firestorm were already on
the ground and had set up the most complete firebase, which was where
Iden’s
troops were coming down with the exception of the
madcats
. As soon as his dropship landed
he
and the other Archons streamed out, then split up to collecting their regulars
that would be coming out of the larger transports.

Iden
was the sixth highest
ranking Jinx on site, but the operation was still under the trailblazer’s
command so he had orders waiting for him in his helmet once he made it to
ground and Larissa sent them out. Right now there were far too many wisps in
the air and more on the way, crossing the planet to get to their location, and
only a handful of anti-air batteries had been set up. Star Force’s skeets and
other aerial craft were pinned to a small area around the firebases, else
they’d run into the anti-air turrets of nearby colonies. That meant they could
only fight here, in a region approximately 200 miles wide, and it was about to
get very, very crowded.

Iden
wasn’t assigned to deal
with that, but he did need to protect the units on the ground that were setting
up the prefab structures and growing the firebases. They couldn’t protect
themselves yet, but buy them enough time and the
battleforts
would allow the rest of the troops the freedom to roam while they could fend
off any nominal attacks on their own.

The lizards were currently sending waves of tanks from
the surrounding colonies in to the contested area, not to mention the troops already
there that had survived the orbital bombardment. Star Force hadn’t taken the
time to level everything, just enough to knock out the key structures. That
meant there were plenty of intact buildings, not to mention underground
structures that would have to be fought through to clean out and properly safe
the area.

That couldn’t be done while the firebases were under
assault, so first priority came to protecting them long enough to get properly set
up and have the mainline troops start coming down. After that the Clans would
be free to push out and start hitting key targets.

Iden
ran from point to
point, leaving
Larkey
and the others to head to their
individual assignments as he headed to one of the currently descending
transports, making sure to stay away from the box on his HUD that showed the
no-go zone where the ship was slated to land. The Archon waited nearby, then as
soon as the doors opened up he ran inside, bypassing a slew of
thors
and ravens as the mechs walked out, all of which were
painted ponytail blue.

Iden
contacted the bay
control as he ran and got one of the reserve mechs for himself. Typically he
fought as infantry, but not every mech was assigned a pilot so that if one was
damaged in the field that pilot could cycle back and pick up a fresh ride. It
was one of those replacements that the striker claimed, with a pair of techs
waiting for him next to the neo running a quick final prep when he arrived
inside the mobile mech bay.

“How we look?” he asked, climbing the ladder up to the
catwalk to get to the rear access hatch in the back of the mech.

“We’ve still got one empty module. Do you want to wait
and have it loaded?”

Iden
shook his head. “No
time. I’m going to be a mauler baby today anyway.”

“She’s good to go then,” the tech said, stepping aside
and waving him to the open hatch.

“Tear ‘
em
up,” the other
said as
Iden
telepathically connected with the mech
controls and began sealing the hatch as he walked through into the small
compartment. Upon a second mental command a series of panels on the floor
depressed and slid aside, with a control harness rising up and locking into
vertical position.
Iden
walked around to the front of
it and stepped backward into the loose boots.

He leaned back and the few other fasteners tightened
around his waist and wrists while the boots snugged up firm against his own
shoes. A headrest was fitted into place, then he felt the prompt from the new
telepathic controls in his mind. He pushed the imaginary button and felt his
vision go out for a moment, with his body likewise going numb as the machine’s
status flooded his own senses.

The next moment he was seeing from the perspective of
his neo, his body’s stimuli replaced with the
machine’s
.
He didn’t care for the crude sensation, for this interface was barely out of
prototype, but he had full control over the war machine from that moment on and
walked it out of its berth in the bay with no more effort than trudging around
with a heavy backpack on. The
neo’s
steps were his
own, not a computer-controlled driving experience, and now had instantaneous
reaction speed compared to the old harness system that he’d actually gotten to
be fairly good with.

He walked in line over to the exit doors, getting hung
up on the back of the flood of mechwarriors who had already been in the ship
and ready to depart immediately. As such he was the next to last mech out, with
Iden
working the battlemap and tagging those mechs he
wanted reassigned to him. Other formations had already been worked out, but
since he was a striker they were immediately reworked around his needs.

Two more neos and six ravens pinged in their
acceptance of his redirect and he set a waypoint on himself as he maneuvered
through the mechs outside the ship and found a bit of open ground. Overhead
there were wisps everywhere around the firebase, with a ring of mechs firing so
many
sammies
up that it looking like the finale of a
fireworks display…except that it never stopped.

Iden
ran his neo out through
the rain of lizard ship parts and popped open the left shoulder on his mech,
inside of which there was a small anti-air
sammy
turret as well. He set it on auto + exterior
control, allowing either his onboard computer or a controller back in the
firebase to target the wisps above while he focused entirely on the ground
fighting. His other shoulder had an anti-infantry plasma scattergun that he
kept locked up, for the tanks ahead weren’t going to be needing that.